摘要：The stability of the global multilateral trade system has been shaken by unilateral tariffs and widespread securitization through

The stability of the global multilateral trade system has been shaken by unilateral tariffs and widespread securitization through industrial policy. Which industries or fields do you think have been most affected? What measures should countries and international organizations take to mitigate the impact of this instability?

Danny QUAH

Dean and Li Ka Shing Professor, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore

Industrial policy has had its most visible, most resonant, most durable impact on semiconductors and Electric Vehicles (EVs). Together with a number of other areas - AI, quantum computing, next generation telecommunications - these two industries involve important technologies of the future. Semiconductors and EVs are also simultaneously consumer - obvious and national - security embedded.

The impact of industrial policy in these, across different nations, has been both constructive and obstructionist. On the one hand, given the criticality of semiconductors in the international economic system, one might argue that their functionality has approached a significance tantamount to that of public goods, in making everything co-work seamlessly. Similarly, EVs puts in the hands of billions of ordinary consumers direct control and impact over patterns of energy usage, significantly so on the boundaries between renewables and hydrocarbons. In its capacity for inadvertent change in global greenhouse gas emissions, EVs are a genuine public good.

Semiconductors and EVs, therefore, are no longer simply ordinary commodities. In this perspective, industrial policy can shed positive spillovers and externalities when different nations subsidise their own nation's research and production, and then compete in international markets. Such industrial policy benefits the nation and inadvertently the entire global economy.

On the other hand, again noting semiconductors' and EVs' criticality but viewed now from a perspective of national security, some nations are using industrial policy, not just to raise their own production, but to reduce, in a targeted way, those of their international competitors. These nations argue that doing this helps keep them safer. This is obstructionist and destructive. Such policy hampers the world's efforts on raising productivity, improving livelihoods, and combating the global climate crisis. Instigators of such policies, in thinking about the challenge as a zero-sum game, have ended up producing a negative-sum outcome. It is an epic fail.

Nations need to come to an agreement that acknowledges mutual dangers and risks (even from one another). Trust building will matter importantly, even more than usual. Nations need to put in place the kind of norms and understanding that will counter zero-sum thinking and evade the epic fail outcome.

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